Bondage and help: Genealogies and hopes in trafficking from Nigeria to Italy

In this paper, I analyze the specific set of transactions and contractual obligations underpinning the sexual labour of migrant Nigerian women, many of whom have been travelling to Italy since the late 1980s. Such trajectories and relationships are often described as part of the bundle of practices falling under the label of “human trafficking.” The analysis unfolds at the level of life stories and public discourses, by tracing alternative genealogies through the historical record, practices of governance, and my own ethnographic research. I analyze several discourses pertaining to the contested issue of “human trafficking” and its relations to enslavement and bondage: from public debates through legal forms, to kinship relations and the historical record, pitting them against other narratives, knowledge practices and the experiences I collected and witnessed first-hand. The latter, I argue, suggest that genealogical analysis may fail to capture the hopes inherent in the migration trajectories of the women whose life stories I am analyzing, and calls for less totalizing conceptualizations of power relations.